In 2025, mobile commerce (m-commerce) is set to account for the majority of e-commerce sales worldwide (Oberlo, 2025). In fact, over half of all web searches are conducted on mobile devices. Reaching potential clients and customers where they are searching for solutions is key to gaining online visibility. In this article, we’ll explore mobile-friendly web design best practices and why mobile website design is a necessity for businesses to thrive in a mobile-first future.
Essential Mobile Website Design Best Practices: How To Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Implement Responsive Design
Responsive design is key to ensuring your website is mobile-friendly in 2025. Responsive design means making sure your website includes fluid grids, and flexible images that can adapt to different screen sizes.
Ensure images adapt to different screen sizes, which will also prevent any blurry images on smaller devices which could affect the quality or look of your site.
To implement responsive images, use <picture> or srcset to select different image sources for different screen sizes:
<picture>
<source srcset=”image-large.jpg” media=”(min-width: 1024px)”>
<source srcset=”image-medium.jpg” media=”(min-width: 768px)”>
<img src=”image-small.jpg” alt=”Image Description”>
</picture>
Prioritise Fast Loading Times
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get insights into how your webpages perform on mobile and desktop and diagnose any performance issues.
Compress Images
Fast loading times are important not only for making sure your website is mobile-friendly but also to ensure your website is optimised for SEO. To improve your page loading times, compress images and make sure to use the right image file type. Larger image file types take longer to load, especially on mobile devices.
Use Lazy Loading
Implement lazy loading so images on your website only load when the user scrolls down, so when the images are visible on the user’s viewpoint. This helps to image initial page loading speed as images don’t load unnecessarily.
You can add this attribute to the <img> tag to enable lazy loading:
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”Image Description” loading=”lazy”>
Implement Thumb-Friendly Navigation
Implementing ‘thumb-friendly’ navigation can help to improve the user experience for mobile users. Placing key elements such as menus and buttons within the lower half of the screen, in the ‘thumb zone’ which is the most accessible area for thumb navigation can help to improve the user experience and navigate with ease through your site.
Ensuring buttons and navigation are large enough to click on without the user needing to zoom helps the user to navigate through your site and reduces friction in the path to purchase.
SEO Mobile Content
Making your copy concise to get users the answers to their questions quickly and easily is key to making your site mobile-friendly. Use relevant keywords to help users gain answers to their queries quickly.
Implement structured data (schema markup) like FAQs to improve user experience and boost search engine visbility. Including conversational style FAQs with long-tail keywords can also help to optimise for voice search. Add question-based content to optimise for local SEO queries.
Choose readable fonts for mobile like Open Sans, Robotos, Montserrat or Arial. Consider reaching out to a web design agency for a bespoke guide to selecting mobile-friendly fonts.
Offer One-Click Checkout
The cart abandonment rate for mobile commerce is 85.6%. But offering one-click checkout could be the game-changer for your business needs.
A key best practice for mobile ecommerce is integrating a reliable payment provider directly into your online store. This allows customers to enter their information such as name, email, and shipping address, just once. The payment processor securely stores these details, so that when they return, they can complete their purchase with a single click. Explore more in our guide to the best payment gateways for ecommerce.
Test and Iterate
User behaviour, device trends, and design preferences change fast. What worked yesterday might not work today. Testing button positions, speeding up loading times, and adjusting navigation and checkout can lead to large improvements in conversion rates. Regularly testing and iterating can help your business website stay competitive.
How Mobile Web Design Directly Impacts Your Business Success
Faster Load Times Mean Higher Conversions
Faster load times typically lead to more conversions. 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, according to Google.
Amazon found that every 100ms in added page load time caused sales to decrease by 1%.
Better UX Equals More Leads and Sales
Mobile-friendly sites typically lead to higher ecommerce sales, due to providing a better user experience.
When you consider mobile-first design, you may also hear the term ‘responsive design’. Aren’t these the same thing?
No, they are not.
Mobile-first design focuses on creating websites optimised for smaller screens first, then scaling up. Responsive design however adapts to different screen sizes dynamically, but doesn’t necessarily start with mobile. However, mobile-first designs often are responsive.
To find out more, read our guide to responsive vs. adaptive web design. Responsive web design is the preferred approach for SEO, as it helps to deliver a consistent experience for users across devices. Both approaches aim to enhance user experience across devices, but they differ in implementation and flexibility.
Google’s Mobile-First Indexing and SEO Benefits
Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it considers the mobile version of your site for indexing purposes.
Google uses bots to crawl your site, and then indexes pages based on the quality of the pages. How highly your site ranks for your chosen keywords depends on the quality of your site, including the user experience provided by your site. Poor user experience means not ranking highly for your target keywords. To rank highly, have good online visibility, and therefore be seen by more potential customers, making sure your site is optimised for mobile is key.
Poor SEO means potential customers and clients will not be able to see your site, so getting mobile optimisation right on your site is crucial to driving leads.
Mobile-friendly sites can improve your local SEO performance, i.e. ‘near me’ searches, if relevant to your business.
Cost-Effectiveness
Focusing on a mobile-first design can help to streamline the costs associated with building your website. Read our guide on ‘How much does a website cost?’ for more information on pricing.
Future-proofing
Prioritising responsive design, optimal website speed and optimising for mobile-first indexing can all help to future-proof your website, keeping your website up to date with emerging technologies and design trends.
User Behaviour on Mobile vs. Desktop
Typically, mobile users engage in quick, on-the-go tasks, whereas desktop users engage in more focused browsing sessions. Mobile users are typically looking for quick answers to questions, whereas desktop users typically engage in more in-depth activities, focusing on research. Catering the content you deliver depending on device type is important to consider when designing your website, to help meet the user’s search intent.
Mobile Design Trends in 2025
Mobile web design trends we expect to see more of in 2025 include:
- Voice Search
- Dark Mode
- Thumb Friendly Navigation
- One-click purchasing
- AI-powered chatbots
Check out our Web Design Trends and Predictions for 2025 for more information.
Common Mobile Web Design Mistakes that Hurt Your Business
Common mobile web design mistakes businesses make include:
- Unresponsive layouts that break on small screens mean you could be missing out on conversions and leads.
- Slow loading times and heavy images can cause frustration to website visitors, resulting in a high bounce rate, leading website visitors to visit competitor websites instead.
- Poor navigation and unclickable buttons can lead to website visitors abandoning their purchase. Making the path to purchase frictionless is key to driving conversions.
Mobile-Friendly Web Design FAQs
Search engines like Google prioritise mobile-first indexing. Websites that are mobile-friendly typically will outrank non-mobile friendly sites in mobile search results.
Best practices for designing a mobile-friendly website include implementing responsive design, compressing images, prioritising fast loading times, using lazy loading, implementing thumb-friendly navigation, providing search optimised content and offering one-click checkout.
Faster loading times can boost user experience, reduce bounce rates and encourage more website engagement, in turn, increasing conversions.
53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, according to Google.
Need a Mobile-Friendly Website? Here’s How Yellowball Can Help
Yellowball is a multi-award-winning web design agency in London. We work with businesses large and small, creating bespoke websites that shine online. Our mobile web design services include responsive design, UX optimisation, SEO services and more.
Let our team show you what your online presence can do. Explore our web design projects for some examples of how we’ve helped businesses across a range of industries. Contact us today.
